What Apple did is create an amazingly intuitive interface – so intuitive that it was instantly adopted as a benchmark by which all mobile touch screen devices will be measured against. In other words, Apple have introduced a new standard. They are saying “this is how users should interact with devices”. And really, a lot of it is common sense – dragging images to scroll, this makes perfect sense metaphorically and I don’t blame Nokia for adopting this as a standard any more than I think one OS copies another for using drag and drop functionality in their IU.

We can dissect a website in a similar way. Your site has a header, footer and a sidebar because you want to keep different types of information in different areas – areas where the user is intuitively going to “know” what information to expect, because the association between location and type of information has become a “standard” in terms of how we interact with websites.

But I don’t call you a copycat for having a grey footer with links to past articles (as is seen on many, many websites), I recognise the utility the user gets from this familiar concept and the fact that it is a good solution to a common problem.

However yes, it is a fine line as I said in the first paragraph. And that line is often subjective ;)

Might see you around Tokyo some time, but I have the feeling we are both so busy as to probably never bump into each other!

Jon

Once everyone agrees on everything I say, I will stop writing. You should still reconsider the Toyota article. I added a couple of links that make it hard to disagree…

Steve jobs speech is for me at the same level. The only thing is that they steal and make flufly things. I just hope Nokia can “imitate” at least in the same level of quality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UjU0rtavE

To say that websites and newspapers cannot have one identity is like saying the signage of cars cannot be identical to the letterhead. You need to apply. That newspaper are a particularly difficult case is true though. You have two interfaces with one identity that shape and represent the same core information in different ways.

Picasso is the man.